Hi Bill,

>Since MS knows how Rushmore works, any chance we could get them ( or he/she, whoever the MS Rusmore expert is ) to give us a definitive, detailed answer to these questions?

Erik Svenson, Program Manager, Internet Tools and Platforms Division with Microsoft Corporation wrote in 1996:

INDEX ON DELETED() TAG DEL

In the special case that you want to exclude delete records from a query, using an index like the first example above will speed up operations when you've set SET DELETED to ON.

Christof